The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world

What will the future look like for office productivity behemoth Microsoft Word …

Go into any office today and you'll find people using Word to write documents. Some people still print them out and file them in big metal cabinets to be lost forever, but again this is simply an old habit, like a phantom itch on a severed limb. Instead of printing them, most people will email them to their boss or another coworker, who is then expected to download the email attachment and edit the document, then return it to them in the same manner. At some point the document is considered "finished", at which point it gets dropped off on a network share somewhere and is then summarily forgotten.

People keep doing this, but it is an astoundingly awful way to work. Here are just a few of the problems:

People sometimes forget to attach the document to their email.

The document can be too large—especially long documents with lots of images—and can clog up the email server.

Nobody knows what edits were made and by whom. Sure, you can turn "Track Changes" on, but as it transforms your document into a horrible illegible mess, most people very quickly turn it off again.

Nobody has any idea which is the most recent version of the document. This leads to amusing email flame wars where people insist that you adopt version control for your file names, which nobody ever does because they are too busy arguing about what the syntax should be. Even if you do manage to get version control, you are still never sure if you have the most recent version.

People save the document in some directory on their hard drive and then forget where it is. The usual solution to this is to email the author again and ask them to resend it.

People miss the email (usually because there are far too many emails in a day) and claim to have never received the document in the first place.

Even if you somehow manage to survive all these pitfalls and your document reaches the Holy Land of $some_random_network_share, your troubles are just beginning. Now nobody knows where your document is, so they have to pester you to tell them. Once you tell them, they'll usually find that they don't have access to that network share. If they do manage to get access, they'll typically open the document and leave it open for an extended period of time, and now you can't edit your own document because it is locked for "Read Only" access. So inevitably you'll save your own modified copy on your local hard drive, and the whole agonizing dance begins again.

Why do we do this? Because everyone uses Word, so we have to. And why does everyone use Word? Because everyone uses Word. It starts to make sense if you just hit your head on the wall enough times.

It's not even Word's fault, really, that these problems happen. Word was designed in a different era, for a very specific purpose. We don't work that way anymore. Microsoft has added a metric ton of collaboration features to Word over the years to try and adapt to this reality, from Track Changes to Sharepoint integration. I've used almost all of them, and not only are they somewhat clunky, but getting other people to use them is like pushing a rock uphill. There has to be a better way.

Alternatives

While working at my job as a technical writer for a small Vancouver-based software company, I thought a lot about what sort of document management system would relieve us from the quagmire of having hundreds of Word documents strewn about various servers and network shares. There were many different options to choose from. Some, like Sharepoint, had the advantage of being bundled with professional versions of Office and—as already mentioned—integrated with Word. Others, like Documentum, boasted of industrial-strength features and came with an industrial-strength price. On the other side of the equation were free, open-source wiki programs supposedly designed to solve this exact business problem.

My criteria were as follows: whatever system I chose had to be easy enough to use that people other than myself would actually use it. (It wasn't that my coworkers weren't smart—quite the opposite—but demands on their time were huge and learning a complicated document system was somewhere below learning Esperanto on their priority list). It had to be fast so that people wouldn't get frustrated by it. It should be scalable, so that people would trust all their documents to it and not worry about it falling over. And finally, while price wasn't a huge concern, it would be nice if it didn't cost as much as a room full of developers.

I chose MediaWiki, the open-source software that powers Wikipedia. It was relatively easy to install on a virtual Linux server. Since everyone has read Wikipedia, the interface was familiar and so our users needed no training. Because Wikipedia managed to efficiently store—at the time of this writing—all human knowledge, speed and scalability weren't a problem. Finally, the price (free) was acceptable.

The real win, however, was that everyone started using it. The developers use it. Our architect uses it. The testers use it. Even my boss uses it! Within a few months, the whole company was on board, and it had transformed our office's documentation landscape. The advantages were obvious:

Everyone was always reading the most recent version of any document.

The entire history of changes was tracked, and anyone could revert any change, so nothing was ever lost.

Many people could work on the same document at the same time, thanks to built-in source control and the ability to edit small chunks of a document without affecting the rest of the page.

You could see who made which change with a single click.

Documents could be linked together in sensible ways.

The entire database was searchable and always fully indexed, so anyone could find any document instantly.

Of course, not everything was perfect. There were still those acres of Word documents to convert, but this was surprisingly easy. A simple CTRL-A, CTRL-C, CTRL-V dance and the text has made its way onto the wiki. All that had to be done then was to add the ==header== and ===subheader=== markup text around the headers and subheaders. (I've played with some wikis that attempt to preserve Word's formatting and allow GUI editing in a Web form, but the results are typically horrible. Plain text is almost always a better way to go). Wikipedia's CSS files automatically make everything look pretty, and more importantly, consistently pretty. Images have to be added manually, but you can store high-resolution images and display smaller versions on the page, so it's actually a net win. There is still the problem of being unable to edit documents while on trains or planes, but universal wireless Internet access is arriving so fast that this issue is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

So that's basically the end of Word at work. Well, at my workplace at least. I have a friend who spends hours and hours taking Word XML documents and untangling them programmatically to extract their data into other formats, and I'm glad I don't have his job. Other friends use Word at work as a matter of course, simply because nobody wants to change. Change is a funny thing, though. One day you wake up and everything is on a wiki somewhere. How did that happen? It happens in much the same way as typewriters suddenly disappeared—because a better alternative arrived. Word—and I know I'll be attacked for saying this—is the new typewriter.

Maybe I'm wrong. Software is, after all, infinitely adjustable, something that typewriters aren't. Microsoft has put some effort into making Word part of the new Web-based world, such as adding support to post an article directly to a blog, including uploading pictures. It's worth noting, however, that this feature was added as a last-minute afterthought. Word, at its advanced age, is unlikely to change what it fundamentally is at the core. For me, the program no longer serves any purpose in my life. Maybe Word 2010 could win me back, but I doubt it. The love is gone, and all the new features in the world won't bring it back.

I've even abandoned Word for my own personal writing. These days, all my writing is destined for the Web, but I still need a place to compose my initial drafts. I can basically use anything for this—I've used NotePad, TextEdit, even FinalWriter on my Amiga. In the end, however, I settled on a very slick software program called Scrivener, available for OS X. It simplifies and enhances the writing process by using a model based around user-defined document sections, not pages of virtual paper. Scrivener has a decent "Save as HTML" feature, which, unlike Word's, produces sane and readable HTML, but even that needs to be cleaned up somewhat before it can be sent to the Web. A much simpler solution is to just copy and paste the text. Where do I paste into? The now-ubiquitous Web text entry box, available on every blog, content management system, and wiki on the planet. It's fast and simple, the perfect combination for our accelerated world.

So farewell, Microsoft Word. Don't feel too bad—you had a long and prosperous run. We had more than twenty years of fun together. You added feature after feature after feature, and I learned how to avoid your crazy style changes whenever I deleted an invisible formatting command. Maybe if you just had "Reveal Codes"… nah, it wouldn't have mattered. The world simply changed.